Truly, madly, slowly

Demographics

July 10, 2012

Where Apps Become Child’s Play

By NICOLE LaPORTE

AN iPad case that doubles as a teething toy? Yes, such a product exists. It’s known as the Fisher-Price Laugh & Learn Apptivity Case (also available for iPods and iPhones) and it sells for $35.

It’s well known that children are quick to learn new technology. But 6-month-olds? How did the idea arise for a toy that allows its user to gnaw on its brightly colored handles and drool on its protective screen, while also manipulating apps for counting and singing?

At Fisher-Price, such products result from a process known as spelunking, which in its literal sense means to explore caves. But in the realm of toy making, it refers to the simple act of watching children play.

A similar process is alive and well at other companies, like LeapFrog, maker of the LeapPad, a touchscreen tablet for children as young as 3; and at Hasbro and Crayola, which have partnered with digital media companies to create apps for very young children.

At Fisher-Price, “we bring babies in with their moms and watch them at play with different types of apps, different types of products,” said Deborah Weber, senior manager of infant research. Her job, she said, is to “understand the ages and stages of babies — what they can and can’t do, what their interests are, and the growing needs of families today.”

Spelunking has been around since the Fisher-Price PlayLab was formed in 1961, the same year that bricks made by a Danish company called Lego made their American debut. In its earlier days, the lab was filled with toys like a googly-eyed rotary phone known as the Chatter Phone, and the Corn Popper, a kind of mini-lottery machine on wheels.

Today, the lab, located at the Fisher-Price headquarters in East Aurora, N.Y., looks more like an Apple store. But instead of adults and teenagers, there are infants staring into computer screens, and parents and toddlers are passing iPads back and forth.

The setting is similar at LeapFrog’s Kid Lab in Emeryville, Calif., where digital devices and apps are tested by children who both have and haven’t had regular exposure to computers.

“Two years ago, it was harder to find kids who had used an iPhone or an iPad at home,” said Alissa McLean, a senior researcher in LeapFrog’s user experience group, which examines how children interact with online content and computers. “Now it’s not hard at all.”

“We used to talk about kids being the first generation of digital natives,” said Jason Root, chief content officer at the Ruckus Media Group, which has partnered with companies like Hasbro to create storybook apps. “Now we have a generation of newborns who are going to be weaned on touch devices.”

At Fisher-Price, Ms. Weber said, “We see 6-month-olds batting at the screen, 9-month-olds swiping, and 12-month-olds pointing out objects to see.” Observations like these are passed along to toy producers and industrial designers, resulting in products like the iPad case and the Laugh & Learn Apptivity Monkey, which comes out in August.

The Apptivity Monkey would pass for just another stuffed animal if it didn’t have a thick, plastic iPhone case attached to its belly; the front of the case is made of see-through plastic. An iPhone can be placed inside, and a child can play apps on it, either by pressing on the iPhone directly or on the monkey’s paws, which interact with an array of alphabet and singing apps.

The monkey is big enough and soft enough so that the iPhone can sustain even major tumbles, Fisher-Price asserts. But the iPhone is not included. So doesn’t that make for a pretty expensive toy?

Maybe not. When Kathleen Kremer, another spelunker who is the company’s senior manager of user experience, was observing how preschool-aged children played with their parents’ iPhones and iPods, she stumbled on the “pass-back factor.”

“People are now on their second-generation iPad or second iPhone, so what they typically do with the old one is give it to their child, so the kids actually have ownership of these devices,” she said. She has also studied diaries and scrapbooks that parents were asked to keep, documenting their children’s behavior.

Because of the pass-back factor, the new Kid Tough Apptivity Case — similar to the Laugh & Learn product, but designed for older children — is made to fit all generations of the gadgets, Ms. Kremer said.

Innovations like this are fueling the digital toy trend, according to Lisa Harnisch, senior vice president and general merchandising manager at Toys “R” Us. Last year, she said, the trend in children’s apps and app-related products “really started to heighten and explode.” Indeed, in the last year, there have been nearly three million downloads of Fisher-Price’s Laugh & Learn apps. By year-end, LeapFrog expects to have 325 apps at its online App Center, double the number at the end of 2011.

Not everyone sees this as a justification to ply infants with computers. “Infants learn best from real people and playing with real toys,” said Dr. Ari Brown, a pediatrician in Austin, Tex., and the author of “Baby 411.” “They learn how to communicate, how to engage with others and how to problem-solve using their five senses. While technology can offer a virtual way to learn some of these skills, they will never replace the value of interacting with humans or being able to manipulate and play with toys in one’s hands.”

In any case, it might be too late to stop an 18-month-old from discovering the joys of Netflix — selecting a movie or TV show to watch, or rewinding and replaying a favorite scene — something that Ms. Kremer has come across in her field research.

“It was pretty remarkable that she could master all those different steps,” she said of the tech-savvy toddler. “The motivation was there.”

April 08, 2012

A Man. A Woman. Just Friends?

By WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ

CAN men and women be friends? We have been asking ourselves that question for a long time, and the answer is usually no. The movie “When Harry Met Sally...” provides the locus classicus. The problem, Harry famously explains, is that “the sex part always gets in the way.” Heterosexual people of the opposite sex may claim to be just friends, the message goes, but count on it — wink, wink, nudge, nudge — something more’s going on. Popular culture enforces the notion relentlessly. In movie after movie, show after show, the narrative arc is the same. What starts as friendship (Ross and Rachel, Monica and Chandler) ends up in bed.

There’s a history here, and it’s a surprisingly political one. Friendship between the sexes was more or less unknown in traditional society. Men and women occupied different spheres, and women were regarded as inferior in any case. A few epistolary friendships between monastics, a few relationships in literary and court circles, but beyond that, cross-sex friendship was as unthinkable in Western society as it still is in many cultures.

Then came feminism — specifically, Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of feminism, in the late 18th century. Wollstonecraft was actually wary of platonic relationships, which could lead too easily, she thought, to mischief. (She had a child out of wedlock herself.) But she did believe that friendship, “the most sublime of all affections,” should be the mainspring of marriage.

In the 1890s, when feminism emerged from the drawing rooms and genteel committees to become a mass, radical movement (the term “feminism” itself was coined in 1895), friendship reappeared as a political demand. This was the time of the “New Woman,” portrayed in fiction and endlessly debated in the press.

The New Woman was intelligent, well read, strong-willed, idealistic, unconventional and outspoken. For her, relationships with men, whether or not they involved sex, had to involve mental companionship, freedom of choice, equality and mutual respect. They had, in short, to be friendships. Just as suffrage represented feminism’s vision of the political future, friendship represented its vision of the personal future, the central term of a renegotiated sexual contract.

Easier said than done, of course. But the notion of friendship as the root of romantic relationships started to seep into the culture. The terms “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” also began to appear in the 1890s.

We take the words for granted now, but think of what they imply, and what a new idea it was: that romantic partners share more than erotic passion, that companionship and equality are part of the relationship. A boyfriend is a friend, as well as a lover. As for husband and wife, Wollstonecraft’s ideal has long since become a cliché. Who doesn’t think of their spouse — or claim to think of them, or want to think of them — as their best friend?

So friendship now is part of what we mean by love. Still, that doesn’t get us to platonic relationships. For that we needed yet another wave of feminism, the one that started in the 1960s. Friendship wasn’t part of the demand this time, but the things that were demanded — equal rights and opportunities in every sphere — created the conditions for it. Only once the sexes mixed on equal and familiar terms at school, at work and in the social spaces in between — only once it was normal and even boring to see a member of the opposite sex at the next desk — could platonic friendships become an ordinary part of life.

And that’s exactly what has happened.

Friendships with members of the opposite sex have been an important part of my life since I went to high school in the late 1970s, and I hardly think I’m alone. Consult your own experience, but as I look around, I don’t see that platonic friendships are actually rare at all or worthy of a lot of winks and nudges. Which is why you don’t much hear the term anymore. Platonic friendships now are simply friendships. But doesn’t the sex thing get in the way? At times, no doubt. It’s harder for the young, of course — all those hormones, and so many of your peers are unattached. In fact, one of the most common solutions to Harry’s quandary is to have sex and then remain friends. If the sex thing gets in the way, the answer often seems to be to just get it out of the way.

But it doesn’t always get in the way. Maybe you’re not attracted to each other. Maybe you know it would never work out, so it’s not worth screwing up your friendship. Maybe that’s just not what it’s about.

So if it’s common now for men and women to be friends, why do we so rarely see it in popular culture? Partly, it’s a narrative problem. Friendship isn’t courtship. It doesn’t have a beginning, a middle and an end. Stories about friendships of any kind are relatively rare, especially given what a huge place the relationships have in our lives. And of course, they’re not sexy. Put a man and a woman together in a movie or a novel, and we expect the sparks to fly. Yet it isn’t just a narrative problem, or a Hollywood problem.

We have trouble, in our culture, with any love that isn’t based on sex or blood. We understand romantic relationships, and we understand family, and that’s about all we seem to understand.

We have trouble with mentorship, the asymmetric love of master and apprentice, professor and student, guide and guided; we have trouble with comradeship, the bond that comes from shared, intense work; and we have trouble with friendship, at least of the intimate kind. When we imagine those relationships, we seem to have to sexualize them.

Close friendships between members of the same sex, after all, are also suspect. Even Oprah has had to defend her relationship with Gayle King, and as for men and men, forget about it.

I cannot think of another area of our lives in which there is so great a gap between what we do and what our culture says we do. But maybe things are beginning to change. Younger people, having grown up with the gay-rights movement and in many cases gone to colleges with co-ed dormitories, are open to a wider range of emotional possibility.

Friendship between the sexes may no longer be a political issue, but it is an issue of liberation: the freedom to love whom you want, in the way that you want. Maybe it’s time that we all took it out of the closet.

William Deresiewicz is an essayist, critic and the author of “A Jane Austen Education.”

February 18, 2012

When Stress Is Good for You

It's Disparaged as Dangerous, but Healthy Levels of Stress Can Pump Up Both Mind and Body

By SUE SHELLENBARGER

Stress: It can propel you into "the zone," spurring peak performance and well-being. Too much of it, though, strains your heart, robs you of memory and mental clarity and raises your risk of chronic disease.

A little stress is helpful for peak performance, but too much can literally shut down the brain. Sue Shellenbarger on Lunch Break looks at how you stay in the good stress zone and tell if you're tipping into bad.

How do you get the benefits—and avoid the harmful effects?

By learning to identify and manage individual reactions to stress, people can develop healthier outlooks as well as improve performance on cognitive tests, at work and in athletics, researchers and psychologists say.

The body has a standard reaction when it faces a task where performance really matters to goals or well-being: The sympathetic nervous system and the hypothalamus, pituitary and adrenal glands pump stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol, into the bloodstream. Heartbeat and breathing speed up, and muscles tense.

What happens next is what divides healthy stress from harmful stress. People experiencing beneficial or "adaptive" stress feel pumped. The blood vessels dilate, increasing blood flow to help the brain, muscles and limbs meet a challenge, similar to the effects of aerobic exercise, according to research by Wendy Mendes, an associate professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, and others.

The body tends to respond differently under harmful or threatening stress. The blood vessels constrict, and "you may feel a little dizzy as your blood pressure rises," says Christopher Edwards, director of the behavioral chronic pain management program at Duke University Medical Center. Symptoms are often like those you feel in a fit of anger. You may speak more loudly or experience lapses in judgment or logic, he says. Hands and feet may grow cold as blood rushes to the body's core. Research shows the heart often beats erratically, spiking again and again like a seismograph during an earthquake.

Another hallmark: "Can you turn it off? Or are you a prisoner of your mind?" says Martin Rossman, an author on healing and stress and a clinical instructor at the University of California, San Francisco, Medical School. People under harmful stress lose the ability to re-engage the parasympathetic nervous system, which drives the body's day-to-day natural functions, including digestion and sleep. While individuals vary in how long they can tolerate chronic stress, research shows it sharply increases the risk of insomnia, chronic disease and early death.

Home builder Carl Weissensee used to be "addicted to stress," he says. Managing thousands of details and multiple risks for each of the multimillion-dollar houses he builds, he spent years rushing around with "one foot off the ground 20 hours a day, running the same scenarios through my mind time and time again, and being unable to put it aside," says Mr. Weissensee, 58, of Mill Valley, Calif.

In an important marker of harmful stress levels, his agitation disrupted his life. "I would sleep four to six hours a night, and even that wasn't good sleep." His wife complained, and his young daughter painted a small rock for him with the words, "You work too much."

A heart attack, followed by problems with cardiac arrhythmia, forced him to find the line between good stress and bad. "I don't believe it's possible to do a good job without a certain amount of stress. It's necessary to get things done," he says.

He has brought it down to a healthy level by using relaxation techniques, including deep breathing and guided imagery—lying still and imagining stressful tasks turning out well. After seeing Dr. Rossman, reading his book and doing one of his relaxation CDs daily, Mr. Weissensee learned to acknowledge his worries instead of recycling them in his head, then practice "skipping over" them and telling himself that "everything works out in the end," he says. He has managed to stabilize his heart condition without large doses of medication.

Falling Levels

People who say their stress level is an 8, 9 or 10 on a 10-point scale, where 1 is 'little or no stress' and 10 is 'a great deal of stress.'

2007

32%

2008

30

2009

24

2010

24

2011

22

Source: American Psychological Association and Harris Interactive

"By practicing over and over, I seem to be changing the path my thoughts take from, 'I'm doomed,' to, 'Things will be OK,' " he says. "My goal is to worry just enough to do my job well."

That kind of positive attitude tends to produce good stress, based on research by Dr. Mendes and others. In a study of 50 college students, some were coached to believe that feeling nervous or excited before a presentation could improve performance. A control group didn't receive the coaching. When the students were asked to make a speech about themselves while receiving critical feedback, those who received the coaching showed a healthier physiological response, leading to increased dilation of the arteries and smaller rises in blood pressure than the control group.

In a similar study, students who received the same coaching before taking graduate-school entrance exams posted higher scores on a mock test in the lab and also on the actual exam three months later, compared with controls, according to a study co-authored by Dr. Mendes and published last year in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. They also posted higher levels of salivary amylase, a protein marker for adrenaline that is linked to episodes of beneficial stress.

People react differently to everyday stress. At-home or mobile biofeedback devices can detect spikes in the heart rate. Hand-held thermometers also can be used to note when the temperature of one's hands falls below 95 degrees, says Kenneth Pelletier, a clinical professor of medicine at both the University of Arizona School of Medicine and the University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco.

Illustration by Mike Right

Toronto psychologist Kate Hays tells patients to imagine a stress scale "ranging from 1, where you're practically asleep, to 10, where you're climbing off the ceiling." Then, she asks them to recall a past peak performance and figure out where their stress at that moment would have ranked. Many people say 4 to 6, but responses range from 2 to 8, says Dr. Hays, who specializes in sports and performance psychology. That becomes their personal stress-management target.

For most people, hitting that target requires new skills. With practice, though, they can learn to relax completely in a few seconds, says Dr. Pelletier.

In addition to thinking positively about stressors, deep abdominal breathing and training in meditation and mindfulness, or regulating one's own mental and physical states, help moderate stress.

All have been shown in research to help heal such chronic problems as heart disease, according to a 2010 research review co-authored by Bonnie Horrigan, director of public education for the Bravewell Collaborative, Minneapolis, a nonprofit that advocates integrating health and medical care. When Ford Motor Co. tested various ways of helping employees with chronic back pain several years ago, corporate medical director Walter Talamonti says, training in reducing harmful stress to healthy levels was linked to reductions in employees' pain and medication use.

Dr. Edwards is seeing 15% to 20% annual increases in patients at his pain clinic seeking biofeedback and other help with stress and stress-related ailments. As many as 35% of them actually want to generate more good stress; many are referred by counselors, parents or coaches.

Many workplace wellness programs have also begun coaching people to hit "the optimal performance zone"—with enough stress "to be stimulating, to focus you, to challenge you" without taking a physical toll, says Dr. Pelletier.

In China, IKEA Is a Swede Place for Senior Romance, Relaxation

At 62, Tang Yingzhuo, a retired widow looking for love, doesn't think it is appropriate to scope out men at bars, clubs or Karaoke joints. That's why she goes to IKEA.

Yang Jie/The Wall Street Journal

Chinese seniors find coffee and love at IKEA.

The former tax-bureau worker is among the throngs of seniors who meet every week at the Swedish retailer's cafeteria in Shanghai's Xuhui shopping district to take a second shot at romance.

Retired and divorced chiropractor Qian Weizhong is also on the prowl. On a recent Tuesday at IKEA Mr. Qian was excited to get the number of a woman he referred to as a "nice lady." He plans to ask her out soon, he said.

While Ms. Tang and the rest of the lonely hearts club flock to the do-it-yourself furniture shop for its clean, homey environment, they pose something of a challenge for IKEA. They sit for hours in the cafeteria, leaving behind orange peels and egg shells they have picked off boiled eggs brought from home. Occasionally, security guards intervene to try to keep order.

At the weekly IKEA romance session in Shanghai, the elderly arrive in swarms of 70 to 700 to get the free coffee offered to holders of the IKEA Family membership card. Zhou Hong, the official IKEA card swiper, says she typically hands out an average of 500 coffee cups each time the group meets.

Ms. Tang, seated amid the backdrop of Poang reading chairs and Vreta poufs, sips coffee and says she is grateful to have such a meeting place. "I make more senior citizen friends when I come here," said Ms. Tang. "There's more to offer than meeting a boyfriend at IKEA."

In China, IKEA is planning to up its nine locations to 17 stores by 2015 to meet demand from the nation's growing middle class, who aspire to Western lifestyles at affordable prices. But some are still in the gawk-phase. They come out of sheer curiosity, or to behold the vast spaces bursting with thousands of gadgets and creature comforts.

As culture and commerce intersect, some unusual behavior has emerged. And older folks aren't the only troublemakers. Young people, often with kids in tow, plop on chairs to watch videos on their smartphones. People aren't shy about kicking off their shoes and tucking into display beds for a nap.

On a recent Sunday in Beijing, Liu Yunfeng sat in a 3,999 yuan ($625) white leather Tirup chair, watching home videos from the screen of her Sony digital camera while her shoeless daughter jumped on the Nyvoll bed of a mock-up room.

"She loves all the different rooms they have," said Ms. Liu, sitting near a man who had dozed off on another bed.

Policing the freeloaders and the unruly isn't so easy. Attempting to tell a rowdy crowd of seniors to lower their voices recently, 24-year-old security guard Li Ya says he encountered resistance. An older man who didn't enjoy being hushed by someone 40 years his junior, says Mr. Li, once splashed scalding coffee on him. "They always argue that they have the right to do what they want here," says Mr. Li.

Earlier this year, after a spate of altercations—and realizing that the seniors were taking seats away from paying customers—managers of the Shanghai IKEA outlet decided to take action.

To keep order, they bolstered security, assigning six guards to the cafeteria on Tuesdays and Thursdays in addition to the usual two posted there on other days.

They created a special roped off zone for sitting, allowing more tables to be open for shoppers who wanted warm tilapia, not hot dates.

They also propped up a notice board at the entrance of the cafeteria, pleading with the group to disband. "IKEA would hereby like to inform this group and its organizers: Your behavior is affecting the normal operations of the IKEA cafeteria," the notice said.

It went on: "Frequent fights and arguments do serious harm to the image both of Shanghai residents and IKEA. Bringing in outside food and tea violates the cafeteria's regulations…If you are a member of this group, we feel we have warned you, do not use the resources of IKEA to organize events of this kind."

Spokeswoman Yin Lifang said IKEA is attempting to find the group's organizers so that it can negotiate with them. Members of the group deny there are organizers.

With people of all ages using big-box stores as their personal playgrounds, a new term has emerged: "retailtainment."

A blend of the words retail and entertainment, it is now frequently used by companies and strategists.

Several years ago, some Wal-Mart stores in China set up a children's camp for summer and winter school breaks. During daily sessions, children are encouraged to try their hands as part-time greeters and announce deals over the broadcast system.

Whether that is enough to convert the campers into consumers is another matter. "If I go to Wal-Mart I'll want to go for the day," said Cui Hongyan. "I can buy my goods somewhere else much more quickly."

McDonald's, with its free Wi-Fi and clean bathrooms, is adding more electrical outlets to most of its China stores in hopes that people will actually come and hang around longer.

In Hong Kong, the fast food giant is developing a service known as "McWedding" to encourage people to marry in their stores. One proposed feature of the ceremony: When it is time for the big kiss, the bride and groom can each chomp on the end of a french fry until their lips meet.

Meanwhile IKEA, known for its Swedish meatballs, has no plans to allow nuptials in its cafeterias.

Time to Revive Home Ec

By HELEN ZOE VEIT

But home economics is more than a 1950s teacher in cat’s-eye glasses showing her female students how to make a white sauce. Reviving the program, and its original premises — that producing good, nutritious food is profoundly important, that it takes study and practice, and that it can and should be taught through the public school system — could help us in the fight against obesity and chronic disease today.

The home economics movement was founded on the belief that housework and food preparation were important subjects that should be studied scientifically. The first classes occurred in the agricultural and technical colleges that were built from the proceeds of federal land grants in the 1860s. By the early 20th century, and increasingly after the passage of federal legislation like the 1917 Smith-Hughes Act, which provided support for the training of teachers in home economics, there were classes in elementary, middle and high schools across the country. When universities excluded women from most departments, home economics was a back door into higher education. Once there, women worked hard to make the case that “domestic science” was in fact a scientific discipline, linked to chemistry, biology and bacteriology.

Indeed, in the early 20th century, home economics was a serious subject. When few understood germ theory and almost no one had heard of vitamins, home economics classes offered vital information about washing hands regularly, eating fruits and vegetables and not feeding coffee to babies, among other lessons.

Eventually, however, the discipline’s basic tenets about health and hygiene became so thoroughly popularized that they came to seem like common sense. As a result, their early proponents came to look like old maids stating the obvious instead of the innovators and scientists that many of them really were. Increasingly, home economists’ eagerness to dispense advice on everything from eating to sleeping to posture galled.

Today we remember only the stereotypes about home economics, while forgetting the movement’s crucial lessons on healthy eating and cooking.

Too many Americans simply don’t know how to cook. Our diets, consisting of highly processed foods made cheaply outside the home thanks to subsidized corn and soy, have contributed to an enormous health crisis. More than half of all adults and more than a third of all children are overweight or obese. Chronic diseases associated with weight gain, like heart disease and diabetes, are hobbling more and more Americans.

In the last decade, many cities and states have tried — and generally failed — to tax junk food or to ban the use of food stamps to buy soda. Clearly, many people are leery of any governmental steps to promote healthy eating; Michelle Obama’s campaign against childhood obesity has inspired right-wing panic about a secret food police.

But what if the government put the tools of obesity prevention in the hands of children themselves, by teaching them how to cook?

My first brush with home economics, as a seventh grader in a North Carolina public school two decades ago, was grim. The most sophisticated cooking we did was opening a can of pre-made biscuit dough, sticking our thumbs in the center of each raw biscuit to make a hole, and then handing them over to the teacher, who dipped them in hot grease to make doughnuts.

Cooking classes for public school students need not be so utterly stripped of content, or so cynical about students’ abilities to cook and enjoy high-quality food.

A year later, my father’s job took our family to Wales, where I attended, for a few months, a large school in a mid-size industrial city. There, students brought ingredients from home and learned to follow recipes, some simple and some not-so-simple, eventually making vegetable soups and meat and potato pies from scratch. It was the first time I had ever really cooked anything. I remember that it was fun, and with an instructor standing by, it wasn’t hard. Those were deeply empowering lessons, ones that stuck with me when I first started cooking for myself in earnest after college.

In the midst of contracting school budgets and test-oriented curricula, the idea of reviving home economics as part of a broad offensive against obesity might sound outlandish. But teaching cooking — real cooking — in public schools could help address a host of problems facing Americans today. The history of home economics shows it’s possible.

Helen Zoe Veit, an assistant professor of history at Michigan State University, is the author of the forthcoming “Victory Over Ourselves: American Food in the Era of the Great War.”

The Children’s Authors Who Broke the Rules

By PAMELA PAUL

The stylistic eccentricities of Maurice Sendak, Shel Silverstein and Theodor Geisel, a k a Dr. Seuss, are so much a part of the childhood vernacular today that it’s hard to imagine their books were once considered by some to be wholly inappropriate for children.

Yet these three authors — who each have a new book coming out this month in what can only be described as a Seussian coincidence (“But, see! We are as good as you. Look! Now we have new books, too!”) — challenged the conception of what a children’s book should be. And children’s literature, happily, has never been the same.

Once upon a more staid time, the purpose of children’s books was to model good behavior. They were meant to edify and to encourage young readers to be what parents wanted them to be, and the children in their pages were well behaved, properly attired and devoid of tears. Children’s literature was not supposed to shine a light on the way children actually were, or delight in the slovenly, self-interested and disobedient side of their natures.

Seuss, Sendak and Silverstein ignored these rules. They brought a shock of subversion to the genre — defying the notion that children’s books shouldn’t be scary, silly or sophisticated. Rather than reprimand the wayward listener, their books encouraged bad (or perhaps just human) behavior. Not surprisingly, Silverstein and Sendak shared the same longtime editor, Ursula Nordstrom of Harper & Row, a woman who once declared it her mission to publish “good books for bad children.”

Theirs were books that taught the wrong lessons and encouraged narcissistic misbehavior. In “Where the Wild Things Are” (1963), Sendak’s masterpiece, a child chases his dog with a fork and yells at his mother — only to be crowned king and served a hot dinner. “I developed characters who were like me as a child, like the children I knew growing up in Brooklyn — we were wild creatures,” Sendak said recently in a phone interview. “So to me, Max is a normal child, a little beast, just as we are all little beasts. But he upset a lot of people at the time.”

These were books that glorified absurdity and made children laugh at the wrong things. “There’s too many kids in this tub,” begins one Silverstein rhyme, “I just washed a behind / That I’m sure wasn’t mine / There’s too many kids in this tub.” Even the grammar is wrong.

Nor were these books especially childish. The Little Nemo-esque dream world Sendak concocted in “In the Night Kitchen” (1970) was inspired by the Holocaust of all ghoulish things. Its cheery bakers wear Hitler-esque mustaches and try to stuff a young boy named Mickey into an oven. Mickey, moreover, is brazenly naked, his genitalia accurately depicted alongside what some deemed “phallic” milk bottles and creamy baking ingredients. Was it a masturbatory fantasy sequence or an innocent dream about baked goods? The book predictably landed on the American Library Association’s list of the “most challenged books” of the 1990s.

But in 1970, Sendak became the first American to win the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award for excellence in children’s book illustration. Still, his books didn’t sit easily in everyone’s idea of the nursery. His next big book, “Outside Over There” (1981), a not-so-cloaked parable of sibling rivalry, tells the story of a gang of goblins kidnapping a baby girl from under her sister’s watch. The book contains mysterious sexual overtones, with the older sister made rapturous by the proceedings.

“Can ‘Outside Over There’ really be a children’s book?” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt asked in The New York Times. “Is it appropriate for a children’s book to be raising such questions?” The book, he wrote in a largely laudatory review, had the “quality of nightmare,” and intimidated his “somewhat withered” inner child.

Shel Silverstein was similarly suspected of being child-unfriendly. In 1964, Silverstein had trouble finding someone to publish “The Giving Tree.” He had already sold one children’s book, “Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back,” but editors thought “The Giving Tree” fell into a nebulous and unpromising noncategory between children’s book and adult literature. “Look, Shel,” William Cole, an editor at Simon & Schuster, later recalled telling Silverstein, “the trouble with this ‘Giving Tree’ of yours is that . . . it’s not a kid’s book — too sad, and it isn’t for adults — too simple.” Another editor was even more dismissive: “That tree is sick! Neurotic!”

“Whimsical” was one word used to describe Silverstein. But it came with a B-side adjective: “weird.” This was a man who had drawn cartoons for Playboy, and who wrote the lyrics to Johnny Cash’s “Boy Named Sue.”

Yet “The Giving Tree” went on to sell 8.5 million copies. It was embraced by Christians as a parable of selflessness and has been denounced by feminists as a patriarchal fantasy in morality-tale clothing. Ellen Handler Spitz, the author of the classic study “Inside Picture Books,” wrote that the story “perpetuates the myth of the selfless, all-giving mother who exists only to be used and the image of a male child who can offer no reciprocity, express no gratitude, feel no empathy — an insatiable creature who encounters no limits for his demands.”

With “Where the Sidewalk Ends” (1974) and “A Light in the Attic” (1981), Silverstein turned another commercial noncategory — verse for children — into a bonanza. Like “The Muppet Show,” both books were a hit among grown-ups and children alike; “A Light in the Attic” spent 182 weeks on the New York Times general nonfiction best-seller list, including 14 weeks at No. 1.

Sendak and Silverstein had roots in the counterculture, but a deeper forerunner is another contrarian children’s book author, Theodore Geisel, otherwise known as Dr. Seuss. The son of prosperous German immigrants, Geisel studied at Dartmouth and Oxford and had a successful career in advertising promoting insecticide and Standard Oil (don’t tell the Lorax!) before turning to cartooning and then children’s literature. His first effort, “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” (1937), a story that describes the wild fabrications a boy plans to tell his father before he ultimately tells the truth, was rejected 27 times before finding a publisher. He went on to Bartholomew Cubbins, Horton and the Grinch.

But the full flowering of his subversive genius came with “The Cat in the Hat” (1957), inspired by lists of words children could be expected to read. “How they compile these lists is still a mystery to me,” Seuss complained in an essay in The New York Times Book Review. The books recommended for young children, he complained, were far beneath their intellectual capacity.

And so “The Cat in the Hat” used only 223 different words of near monastic simplicity, showing that one could achieve the sublime under absurd constraints. The Book Review, in a typically glowing response, called it “one of the most original and funniest of books for young readers,” adding, “Beginning readers and the parents who have been helping them through the dreary activities of Dick and Jane . . . are due for a happy surprise.”

Today, Sendak’s, Silverstein’s and Seuss’ books define what we’ve come to think of as children’s literature. Their new books are no exception. “Bumble-Ardy,” the first picture book Sendak has written and illustrated in 30 years (it is based on an animated segment that appeared on “Sesame Street” in 1971), tells the story of a rambunctious pig who has never had a birthday party. Naturally, the one he gives himself — absent caregiver! dirty stunts! guzzled brine! — devolves into a mess. “Every Thing on It,” the fourth volume of collected verse from Silverstein, who died in 1999, contains poems about snotty pasta (“Betty, Betty, / Sneezed in the spaghetti, / Made it icky and gooey and wetty”). And “The ­Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories,” a collection of Dr. Seuss stories that appeared previously only in magazines, features the kinds of nonsense that blend right in with the Stinky Cheese Man and SpongeBob SquarePants.

Books by Seuss, Sendak and Silverstein are now the classics we reach to when building our children’s libraries. They exemplify the traditions we defend. As Sendak put it at the end of our conversation, “Thank God we have grown up.”

A Sleep Battle of the Sexes

Women Sleep More but Men Complain Less; Who Copes Better When Exhausted?

Women tend to have more deep sleep and awaken fewer times during the night than men do. They also weather some of the effects of a lack of sleep better than men, according to recent studies. Still, men overall say they are more satisfied with the amount and quality of their shut-eye than are women.

Getting enough sleep is an important factor in maintaining overall health. Scientists are increasingly focusing on gender differences in sleep, seeking clues about why women are more likely to suffer insomnia, for instance. Some researchers suggest that differences in sleep patterns could help explain why women live longer than men.

Andrea Petersen explains on Lunch Break why men and women sleep differently and whether it may partly explain why women generally have better health and live longer.

"Women on average have longer sleep than men; women on average are healthier than men. It could be that those are related," says Daniel J. Buysse, a professor of psychiatry and clinical and translational science at the University of Pittsburgh. Sleep difficulties have been linked in many studies with chronic conditions like cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Most people regularly sleep with a partner, and some research has shown that people wake up more and have less deep sleep when they sleep with another person. Still, people generally say they are more satisfied with their sleep when they are with a loved one. "There are objective costs to the physical presence of someone else in the bed," says Wendy M. Troxel, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh and a leading researcher on relationships and sleep. But "the safety and security we derive from our social relationships trumps the cost," she says.

Men and women have different body clocks. Men's average "circadian period" was 24 hours, 11 minutes—six minutes longer than for women, according to a study presented at the American Academy of Sleep Medicine's annual meeting in June in Minneapolis. Although six minutes doesn't seem like a big deal, the effects can compound day after day. Researchers determined circadian period by measuring core body temperature and levels of the hormone melatonin.

During the study, which involved 157 healthy people, more men had circadian periods longer than 24 hours and therefore were predisposed to want to go to bed later and get up later each day—classic behavior of so-called night owls. By contrast, twice as many women as men had body clocks shorter than 24 hours and therefore wanted to go to bed earlier and get up earlier. "That may make it more difficult to stay asleep at the end of the night," contributing to insomnia in women, says Jeanne F. Duffy, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston and the lead author of the study.

For both sexes, a circadian period that is out of sync with the 24-hour clock can result in sleep deprivation as the week goes on. People with short biological clocks may want to increase exposure to light at night and eliminate it in the morning. Night owls should reduce light exposure before bedtime and get bright light in the morning. Trying to catch up on sleep on the weekends can just push one's biological clock further out of whack.

Women, on the whole, get more sleep and fall asleep faster than men. About 30% of women said they sleep eight hours or more on weekdays, compared with 22% of men, according to the National Sleep Foundation's 2005 Sleep in America Poll, which surveyed 1,506 people. A small study looking at the sleep of healthy young adults found that women slept an average of 7 hours, 43 minutes in a night, or 19 minutes more than men. And women took 9.3 minutes on average to fall asleep, whereas men took 23.2 minutes. The study, published in the journal Chronobiology International in 2005, followed 16 men and 15 women—a small but not uncommon number for sleep studies—over three nights in a sleep laboratory.

Given this, researchers say it isn't clear why in numerous studies women tend to complain more about their sleep, saying they don't get enough shut-eye and find it difficult to fall asleep and stay asleep. Sleep studies might not be picking up the whole story, some researchers say, adding that more investigation is needed.

While mothers of young children often feel like they get no sleep, Dr. Buysee says the research doesn't bear that out. "This isn't going to be popular, but some studies show that mothers get more sleep than fathers," he says. Women likely feel worse because their sleep is so interrupted. "If the woman's sleep is more fragmented, she's going to suffer more consequences," he says.

Multiple studies have shown that women generally have more slow-wave sleep, which is the deepest sleep. It tends to happen in the first part of the night and is critical to memory formation.

Women may be better able to cope with sleep deprivation than are men, probably because they get more deep sleep, recent research suggests. A small study, presented at the American Academy of Sleep Medicine's annual meeting, aimed to mimic the common practice of people not getting enough sleep during the work week and then trying to make up for it on the weekends. Both men's and women's performance on a 10-minute computer task that measured reaction time and speed, among other variables, deteriorated after five nights of only six hours of sleep.

Men and women have different body clocks, according to a study presented at the American Academy of Sleep Medicine's annual meeting.

But women's scores slipped less then men's, and recovered to a greater degree after two nights of extended sleep, of eight hours. "I think what our data show is that women can deal with sleep loss better than men," says Alexandros Vgontzas, professor of psychiatry at Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, Pa., and a co-author of the study, which involved 16 men and 18 women.

Sleep can help reinforce learning in both men and women, such as college students readying for an exam. But to absorb certain kinds of knowledge, known as perceptual learning, men needed a nap whereas women didn't, according to another study presented at the sleep medicine academy's meeting.

In the study, 126 subjects completed a task that required them to identify differences in the movement of dots on a screen. The subjects then underwent some training in the task and were tested again to see how much they had learned. Men only learned after a nap. Women learned whether they napped or not. "It may be the case that women are better suited for tasks requiring sustained perception, jobs like air-traffic controllers or radiologists who are reading MRIs," says Elizabeth McDevitt, a study coordinator at the University of California, San Diego and the lead author of the study.

Life changes, including pregnancy and menopause, can wreak havoc on women's sleep. Overall, however, men wake up more often during the night, partly because of their greater risk for obstructive sleep apnea, researchers say.

Some researchers say some women may not feel they're getting a good night's sleep because sleep studies may not be seeing the whole picture when it comes to insomnia. New studies using PET scans have shown that in patients with insomnia, glucose metabolism is elevated in some parts of the brain. So even when they're asleep "their brain isn't completely shut off," says Dr. Buysse. Women are about 50% more likely to have insomnia than men. Other researchers say women, more than men, tend to suffer from depression and anxiety disorders, which can lead to insomnia.

Will you be cooking curry today? :) Participate in this meaningful event and spread the importance of intercultural understanding between countries and also between the different races and nationalities within one country!

Tom Yam Curry by yours truly. This was a dish that I had prepared for my family dinner held on Singapore's National Day (9 Aug). Curry is a well-loved dish by most if not all Singaporeans and I sincerely hope that the new migrants to the little red dot will learn to adapt to our way of life.

This is a Facebook Page created by a group of Singaporeans after a report came about that a mainland Chinese family (from China) told a local Indian Family not to eat curry and not to cook curry. The appointed mediator - a certain Madam Giam facilitated the case in such a way that : the Indian family could cook curry only when the mainland Chinese family is not at home. (mediation agreement).

So far, more than 60,000 around the world (mostly Singaporeans!) are joining in. Cook a pot of curry or buy a take-out from a restaurant (if you can't cook or too busy to do so). A meaningful event to spread the importance of interculural understanding between countries and also between the different races and nationalities within one country.

How we feel------------------------------How could a appointed mediator facilitate the case in such a way that restricts the lifestyle and cooking norms of the Indian family? Or any other local family who practices a cultural lifestyle that we have all made our own? In this case, Curry has always been part of our culture since the 1800s. It can be anything else that you or I hold dear.

There is a native Malay proverb "Di mana bumi dipijak, di situ langit dijunjung" ("You should hold up the sky of the land where you live") - ie one should respect the country in which you choose to live in. ( ie blend/ assimilate/ understand/ tolerate / integrate into the community of your chosen choice)

What we wish for-----------------------------When the new immigrants arrive here, we wish for them to respect / embrace the cultural / lifestyle and linguistic norms of this nation. We wish for all new immigrants and citizens to understand and appreciate the various and diverse cultural aspects of the various ethnic-minority groups we have here.

This is Singapore and we are part of Malayan culture. Our hinterland previously was Malaysia and the Indonesian archipelago. Our ancestors came, met and mingled and through an adventurous and open mindset, created something unique and beautiful... (thus our local culture as such- curries/ spices/ a vast melting pot of people and mixed heritages)

* A message to all new citizens: We sincerely hope you integrate into our local culture and make attempts to assimilate and embrace/ appreciate the various multi-ethnic cultures we had built up so painstakingly over the decades. Because at the same time, we are definitely open to taking the best that you have to offer, and to create new and beautiful Singaporean things.

*We Singaporeans are basically nice and tolerant people. We will accept you as new citizens and hope you blend in and integrate with us well.

Upset with CMC -----------------------We are mainly upset with the "Community Mediation Centre's" mediation action of actually facilitating such a mediation agreement. It is the inalienable right of the Indian family to cook curry at any time they wish to within the four walls of their home. (having said that, let us all- natives, new citizens or otherwise, embrace the multi-cultural aspects of our nation)

June 25, 2011

News

Jun 26, 2011

Marriage: Don't wait for stars to be aligned

Govt will try to raise rate but couples should not wait for tangible perks, says MG Chan

By Jessica Cheam

(from left) NTUC FairPrice CEO Seah Kian Peng, co-chair of the National Family Celebrations organising committee Lim Soon Hock, DPM Teo, Minister of State for Community Development, Youth and Sports Halimah Yacob and MG Chan enjoying a game at the Family Day Out carnival at Marina Bay yesterday. -- PHOTO: LIANHE ZAOBAO

The Government will keep on trying to raise the marriage rate in Singapore, but couples also should not hinge their decision to tie the knot on just tangible incentives, said Acting Minister for Community Development, Youth and Sports Chan Chun Sing yesterday.

Singaporeans should not wait till 'all the stars are aligned', such as owning an HDB flat or a car, before they get married, he advised. This is because it is impossible to have the perfect conditions for getting married or having a child.

Major-General (NS) Chan was speaking on the sidelines of the National Family Celebrations at Marina Bay yesterday.

Earlier, at the same event, Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean reminded participants in a speech that everyone has a part to play in making Singapore family-friendly.

'As a society, we need to help our families to cope and to thrive by building a pro-family environment. This goes beyond government measures, such as Baby Bonus, paid maternity leave and childcare leave,' said Mr Teo.

The DPM added that the celebrations - an annual event organised by the National Family Council, which this year focused on youth - are a 'good reminder to us parents that strong family support is essential for our young people as they mature as adults'.

Said MG Chan: 'This has to do with the culture, that we bring up our children to be more family-oriented, that the family is always at the centre of one's life.'

MG Chan commented on recently released figures which show Singapore's marriage rate having dipped to a historic low last year.

He said Singaporeans should be more concerned about long-term marriage trends instead of worrying about any blips in the statistics.

'Let us look at the trend rather than a particular year's statistics... There might be one or two reasons why there is a drop, but overall I think we're more concerned with the trend,' he added.

'We're not too excited when next year there's a sudden increase or dip. What we're more interested in is whether the trend overall is a more positive one.'

The month-long National Family Celebrations closed yesterday with its Family Day Out carnival, which drew 36,000 Singaporeans to Marina Bay to spend a day with their families.

April 30, 2011

Nuptial economics

Unbridled

Wedding jollity—more or less

Apr 28th 2011 | from the print edition

WHEN Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer in 1981 millions of Britons partied in public. Far fewer were expected at street parties for Prince William’s wedding on April 29th, not least because of the red tape that now snags public gatherings. David Cameron vainly told local authorities to “let people get on and have fun.”

Few prime ministers need to implore their people to party. More often governments are trying to stop them: the Afghan authorities have been considering a proposal to limit the boom in weddings, sombre affairs under the Taliban. The suggested limit is 300 guests and a few dollars per head.

Other countries have similar worries. Wedding laws in Tajikistan now maintain that only one course may be served. India’s legendary nuptial shindigs risk emptying not just the country’s wallets, but its bellies too. In February the food minister estimated that close to 15% of all grains and vegetables in the country are wasted through “extravagant and luxurious social functions”, such as lavish wedding banquets. Days later, diners at a society wedding pecked at a 100-dish menu. Party-poopers want India’s food security laws to curb such profligacy.

Some rich governments choose to subsidise expensive weddings. In the United Arab Emirates many males (a third of Dubai men, for example) wed foreigners, at a quarter of the price of marrying a local girl. The government aims to reduce the rising number of single local women by offering prizes of up to $19,000 to men who marry them.

Surveys in America price the average wedding at close to $30,000 (though the mean is inflated by high-cost dos; the median is lower). Costs peaked in 2008; economic gloom has since dampened them. Yet over 20 years the price has almost doubled, while America’s marriage rate is down by nearly a third.

Last year the canon chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, Giles Fraser, argued that outsize celebrations were a threat to marriage itself. He said modern British nuptials were an “overblown vanity project” seen out in “an atmosphere of narcissism and self-promotion”. Most clergy, he argued, now prefer taking funerals. Perhaps. But Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding, likely to reach more than a billion viewers worldwide, is unlikely to assist the noble cause of nuptial austerity.

April 18, 2011

Media's ageing audiences

Peggy Sue got old

Viewers, listeners and readers are ageing fast. Oddly, media companies don’t regard that as a catastrophe

Apr 7th 2011 | from the print edition

A FEW years ago Universal Music Group spied a gap in the market. How about a CD for people who grew up in the 1950s and wanted to revisit the pop music of their youth? The label pulled together songs by British and American artists, some well-known (Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison), others largely forgotten. “Dreamboats and Petticoats” was released in time for Christmas 2007.

That gap turned out to contain a seam of gold. “Dreamboats and Petticoats” has sold enough copies to be certified as double platinum. It has inspired a West End musical and three follow-up albums, with another due in November. In total the series has sold 2.3m copies, mostly in Britain—a country where fewer than 120m albums were shifted last year. And virtually everybody who bought the album forked over money for a compact disc. “They don’t download, and they don’t want to download,” says Brian Berg of Universal.

“They” are consumers in late middle-age or beyond, who increasingly drive the music market. In Britain people aged 60 or over spent more on pop-music albums in 2009 than did teenagers or people in their 20s, according to the BPI, a trade group. Sony Music’s biggest-selling album worldwide last year was “The Gift”, by Susan Boyle, a 50-year-old Scot whose appeal derives in part from her lack of youth. And what has happened to music has also happened to other forms of entertainment.

The noisy disruption of media business models by the internet in the past decade has obscured a profound demographic transformation. Whether they are buying music, listening to the radio, reading newspapers or watching television, media consumers are ageing even more quickly than the overall population. Rather than trying to reverse this trend by attracting younger people, many companies are attempting to profit from the greying of media.

Grey anatomy

In America the audiences of all four big English-language broadcast networks are looking middle-aged. Since 2003 the median age of a prime-time CBS viewer has increased by three years, according to Nielsen, a research firm. Viewers of ABC and NBC are five years older; Fox’s, seven and a half. In that time the median age in America has probably risen by a year and a bit. Some shows are greying faster than the networks that carry them, in part because they have fan bases that are ageing naturally. The audience that tunes in for the desperate housewives of Wisteria Lane is approaching 50 (see chart 1).

Indeed, every network except Fox had a median age of 50 or over last year. That is significant because advertisers tend to be most interested in how a show rates among people aged between 18 and 49. As Alan Wurtzel, head of research at NBC, puts it, a growing proportion of viewers are becoming almost invisible to marketers—“forgotten but not gone”.

If broadcast television is growing old gracefully (helped by Botox injections), newspapers are racing towards senescence. Between 2002 and 2010 the proportion of American papers’ regular readers who were aged 55 or more rose from 37% to 46% (see chart 2). Fully 43% of readers of Britain’s Daily Telegraph and Daily Express are at least 65 years old, according to the National Readership Survey. Such papers are littered with advertisements for comfortable shoes, cruises and stairlifts.

The reason why newspaper readers are ageing so quickly is simple: the young are abandoning print faster than everyone else. They may pick up free papers to read on public transport, but when reception is good they tend to plump for mobile phones and the internet. The Pew Research Centre, an American think-tank, finds that 65% of 18- to 29-year-olds describe the internet as their primary or secondary source of news. Only 14% of people aged 65 or over say the same.

In music, too, the young have drifted to illegal file-sharing and, more recently, to free streaming services such as Spotify. By and large, the middle-aged and old have not. David Munns, who manages Bon Jovi, a rock band that was formed in the early 1980s and is still going strong, notes that older fans have more money and more scruples. They also regard illegal downloading as “too much work”, he says. Bon Jovi’s “Greatest Hits” was the 15th-biggest-selling album in the world last year.

As the young cut back on conventional media, their elders consume more of it. In Spain 54.2% of people aged 55 to 64 routinely listened to the radio last year—up from 46.6% in 2000. As a result, the Spanish radio audience has greyed even as overall listening has risen. Japanese baby-boomers carry on buying music at an age by which earlier generations had largely stopped. Singers who appeal to the middle-aged and old, such as Hideaki Tokunaga and Junko Akimoto, rule the charts.

The same is true of television. British 55- to 64-year-olds spent an average of five hours and ten minutes a day watching television last year—50 minutes more than in 2001. The middle-aged and old now have free digital channels dedicated to their tastes, such as ITV3, home of wrinkly detective dramas, and the highbrow BBC Four. They have seized on easy-to-use gadgets like digital video recorders, which increase their enjoyment of television.

The young are not watching less TV. But some of their viewing is now done through computer screens. And much of it is of unconventional channels. Instead of the evening news, American 20-somethings watch “The Colbert Report”, a spoof news show. MTV has moved beyond music videos into reality shows, and is enjoying its best ratings in years. Media outfits that appeal to immigrants and their children often have youthful audiences. Univision, a Spanish-language broadcast network, boasts a median age of 37.

Now they’re 64

Greying audiences are causing discomfort among media executives. But not as much discomfort as you might expect, given the industry’s long preoccupation with youth. The ageing of the large baby-boom generation means there are a lot of potential customers in their 50s and 60s. Furthermore, the executives argue, people of this age are worth much more than in the past.

The practice of measuring television audiences by the number of 18- to 49-year-olds they contain is simply an historical anachronism, argues Mr Wurtzel of NBC. David Poltrack, his counterpart at CBS, agrees. It used to be assumed, he says, that older people had already worked out which brands they liked and could not be persuaded to try new things. But the middle-aged have taken to toys such as e-readers and iPads. Mr Poltrack has devised an alternative way of classifying viewers that emphasises tastes and attitudes to media (for example as “sports enthusiasts” or “surfers and streamers”) rather than age.

It is not surprising that ageing television networks should argue that the old are becoming more valuable. But the West’s economic slump has given force to their claims by sapping the earning power of the young. In March the unemployment rate among Americans aged 20 to 24 was 15%. For 16- to 17-year-olds it was 29%.

Lack of work has combined with tighter lending standards to squeeze young people’s buying power. Between 2007 and 2009 average spending on new cars and trucks by Americans under 25 fell by half, according to the Consumer Expenditure Survey. It fell by 31% among people aged between 25 and 34. By contrast, expenditure by those over 65 was flat, and the over-75s actually spent more, on average. The young also spent less on audio-visual equipment and services—that is, television sets and cable TV—while the old shelled out more. This helps to explain why advertising money has flooded back to the ageing broadcast networks since the recession. Advertisers are not so in thrall to the cult of youth that they are prepared to overlook such a shift.

Desperate, but not for younger viewers

Another reason why media companies are not too worried about the ageing of their audiences has to do with a change in business models. A firm that depends on advertising needs to attract valuable consumers. A firm that relies on subscriptions, by contrast, cares only whether its consumers pay their monthly bills. And perhaps the strongest trend in media in the past few years—stronger even than ageing—is the growing reliance on subscription as a means of paying for content.

BSkyB, Discovery Communications, ESPN, Netflix: many of the media industry’s best-performing companies and hottest stocks of recent years rely on subscriptions. The recession may have slashed advertising and discretionary spending. But most people carried on paying the bills for entertainment. As a result, subscription-based businesses were able to sustain spending on content. So clear are the advantages of these businesses that even firms that have habitually relied on advertising are moving to copy them.

As newspaper advertising has declined, publishers have raised the prices of subscriptions and single copies. Last year 41.3% of the New York Times’s newspaper revenues came from subscriptions—up from 28.8% in 2007. Similarly, broadcast networks are battling for “retransmission fees” (essentially a cut of subscriptions) from cable and satellite distributors. As the broadcasters become less dependent on advertising, sheer numbers will come to matter more than demography.

The clearest sign of this shift is the appearance of online paywalls. Last month paywalls went up around the New York Times and the Dallas Morning News. The websites of Britain’s Times and News of the World began to restrict access to subscribers last year. Hulu, an American website that carries broadcast TV programmes, and Spotify, a European music-streaming service, are both pushing subscriptions.

One good reason for media firms to erect paywalls is that new media are beginning to age, too. The proportion of people aged 65-plus who get most of their news from the internet may be only 14%—but in 2006 it was a mere 2%. Online video streaming began as a young person’s hobby but has increasingly become mainstream. “Often it’s the young who adopt a technology, but others follow them,” explains Patricia McDonough, a television analyst at Nielsen.

With a few exceptions, media firms have found it hard to make money online. Consumers seem to tolerate fewer ads, and rates are low. When digital media were the province of youth, this did not matter much: media firms could argue that they were at least promoting their brands to young people, while deterring them from piracy. But let the middle-aged and the old, too, discover they can have entertainment for nothing? That would not do.

Mar 26, 2011

'Cupid' course

Participants will be taught how to matchmake their single friends

Almost half felt the best way for them to find a partner was through friends

One in 10 said their family's informal introductions would be the best way to find a mate

Married couple Ian Lin and Liang Yiwen (background) brought their friends Tom Ng and Lio Weiyun together. Mr Ng and Ms Lio are now engaged. Ms Liang feels that pairing two people is a matter of common sense. -- ST PHOTO: NEO XIAOBIN

FRIENDS and relatives of singles are being sought after to play Cupid.

The Government, anxious to get more people hitched and into nesting mode to arrest the falling birth rate here, even wants to help them learn the fine art of matchmaking.

What love is about, the science of attraction, how to set up their friends with panache, and the advice to dish out on what to wear and what to say on that first date - these are topics to be covered in a course run by the Social Development Network (SDN) and to be taught by counsellors or social workers.

It will cost an aspiring Cupid about $20 to learn the moves.

The reason the course is targeted at members of the public is that singles prefer to meet a potential partner through family or friends.

A survey by the SDN last year found that nearly half of the 1,500 singles who responded wanted to meet that someone special through friends; 10 per cent preferred introductions through family.

Minister of State for Community Development, Youth and Sports Yu-Foo Yee Shoon said yesterday at the opening of Real Loves 2011, a week-long slew of events to celebrate marriage, that the pilot run of the course in July will be for marriage solemnisers, because they already show an interest in helping others find love and can spread the word about the course to grassroots workers.

Mrs Yu-Foo said families are now smaller and rely less on the ties that used to bind entire kampungs and spurred villagers to step in to matchmake eligible men and women in their midst.

Today, formal channels like matchmaking agencies do the job, she said.

She had some numbers to show that the exercise is more than a passing amusement: The number of singles is growing. They now make up 32.2 per cent of the resident population aged 15 and older, up from 30.5 per cent in 2000.

If the 61-year-old sounds evangelistic, it is because her own marriage is the result of a crack-shot Cupid. She said she met her husband Yu Lee Wu, now a 64-year-old retired professor, through friends.

Meanwhile, among those who are already playing matchmaker are some who are open to attending the course.

Credit analyst Liang Yiwen, 27, and her research-engineer husband Ian Lin, 28, already claim one success in matchmaking - without formal training: Their friends Lio Weiyun, 27, and Tom Ng, 28, who they brought together last year, are now engaged to be married.

Ms Lio, a human resources executive, and Mr Ng, a bank analyst, met during preparations for the wedding between Ms Liang and Mr Lin last October.

Ms Liang said: 'I'd find out from Weiyun how she felt about Tom, and my husband would tell him. They were shy so we became the middlemen, relaying messages to the other party.'

Ms Liang said she would consider attending the course, although pairing two people was a matter of 'common sense', and the fee may be a deterrent.

Online media-firm manager Yang Huiwen, 24, agreed the fee was a turn-off but thought some tips were worth picking up, going by her 'zero success rate' with matchmaking five couples.

The chief executive of Lunch Actually, Ms Violet Lim, said she does not feel threatened by the programme because a dating agency like hers offers a wider pool of contacts than friends or family can.

'Friends may be well-meaning, but they have their own lives and jobs so the help they give may not be consistent. I think, ultimately, it's good to equip those who are interested in matchmaking with skills, because we all want to see singles married off as well.'

March 20, 2011

The Japanese Could Teach Us a Thing or Two

When America is under stress, as is happening right now with debates about where to pare the budget, we sometimes trample the least powerful and most vulnerable among us.

So maybe we can learn something from Japan, where the earthquake, tsunami and radiation leaks haven’t caused society to come apart at the seams but to be knit together more tightly than ever. The selflessness, stoicism and discipline in Japan these days are epitomized by those workers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, uncomplainingly and anonymously risking dangerous doses of radiation as they struggle to prevent a complete meltdown that would endanger their fellow citizens.

The most famous statue in Japan is arguably one of a dog, Hachiko, who exemplified loyalty, perseverance and duty. Hachiko met his owner at the train station when he returned from work each day, but the owner died at work one day in 1925 and never returned. Until he died about 10 years later, Hachiko faithfully went to the station each afternoon just in case his master returned.

I hope that some day Japan will erect another symbol of loyalty and dedication to duty: a statue of those nuclear plant workers.

I lived in Japan for five years as the Tokyo bureau chief for The New York Times, and I was sometimes perceived as hostile to the country because I was often critical of the Japanese government’s incompetence and duplicity. But the truth is that I came to cherish Japan’s civility and selflessness. There’s a kind of national honor code, exemplified by the way even cheap restaurants will lend you an umbrella if you’re caught in a downpour; you’re simply expected to return it in a day or two. If you lose your wallet in the subway, you expect to get it back.

The earthquake has put that dichotomy on display. The Japanese government has been hapless. And the Japanese people have been magnificent, enduring impossible hardships with dignity and grace.

As I recalled recently on my blog, I covered the 1995 Kobe earthquake that killed more than 6,000 people, and I looked everywhere for an example of people looting merchandise from one of the many shops with shattered windows. I did find a homeowner who was missing two bicycles, but as I did more reporting, it seemed as if they might have been taken for rescue efforts.

Finally, I came across a minimart owner who had seen three young men grab food from his shop and run away. I asked the shop owner if he was surprised that his fellow Japanese would stoop so low.

Granted, Japan’s ethic of uncomplaining perseverance — gaman, in Japanese — may also explain why the country settles for third-rate leaders. Moreover, Japan’s tight-knit social fabric can lead to discrimination against those who don’t fit in. Bullying is a problem from elementary school to the corporate suite. Ethnic Koreans and an underclass known as burakumin are stigmatized. Indeed, after the terrible 1923 earthquake, Japanese rampaged against ethnic Koreans (who were accused of setting fires or even somehow causing the quake) and slaughtered an estimated 6,000 of them.

So Japan’s communitarianism has its downside, but we Americans could usefully move a step or two in that direction. Gaps between rich and poor are more modest in Japan, and Japan’s corporate tycoons would be embarrassed by the flamboyant pay packages that are common in America. Even in poor areas — including ethnic Korean or burakumin neighborhoods — schools are excellent.

My wife and I saw the collective ethos drummed into children when we sent our kids to Japanese schools. When the teacher was sick, there was no substitute teacher. The children were in charge. When our son Gregory came home from a school athletic meet, we were impressed that he had won first place in all his events, until we realized that every child had won first place.

For Gregory’s birthday, we invited his classmates over and taught them to play musical chairs. Disaster! The children, especially the girls, were traumatized by having to push aside others to gain a seat for themselves. What unfolded may have been the most polite, most apologetic, and least competitive game of musical chairs in the history of the world.

Look, we’re pushy Americans. We sometimes treat life, and budget negotiations, as a contest in which the weakest (such as children) are to be gleefully pushed aside when the music stops. But I wish we might learn a bit from the Japanese who right now are selflessly subsuming their own interests for the common good. We should sympathize with Japanese, yes, but we can also learn from them.

March 11, 2011

Why Monogamy Matters

Social conservatives can seem like the perennial pessimists of American politics — more comfortable with resignation than with hope, perpetually touting evidence of family breakdown, social disintegration and civilizational decline.

But even doomsayers get the occasional dose of good news. And so it was last week, when a study from the Centers for Disease Control revealed that American teens and 20-somethings are waiting longer to have sex.

In 2002, the study reported, 22 percent of Americans aged 15 to 24 were still virgins. By 2008, that number was up to 28 percent. Other research suggests that this trend may date back decades, and that young Americans have been growing more sexually conservative since the late 1980s.

Why is this good news? Not, it should be emphasized, because it suggests the dawn of some sort of traditionalist utopia, where the only sex is married sex. No such society has ever existed, or ever could: not in 1950s America (where, as the feminist writer Dana Goldstein noted last week, the vast majority of men and women had sex before they married), and not even in Mormon Utah (where Brigham Young University recently suspended a star basketball player for sleeping with his girlfriend).

But there are different kinds of premarital sex. There’s sex that’s actually pre-marital, in the sense that it involves monogamous couples on a path that might lead to matrimony one day. Then there’s sex that’s casual and promiscuous, or just premature and ill considered.

This distinction is crucial to understanding what’s changed in American life since the sexual revolution. Yes, in 1950 as in 2011, most people didn’t go virgins to their marriage beds. But earlier generations of Americans waited longer to have sex, took fewer sexual partners across their lifetimes, and were more likely to see sleeping together as a way station on the road to wedlock.

And they may have been happier for it. That’s the conclusion suggested by two sociologists, Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, in their recent book, “Premarital Sex in America.” Their research, which looks at sexual behavior among contemporary young adults, finds a significant correlation between sexual restraint and emotional well-being, between monogamy and happiness — and between promiscuity and depression.

This correlation is much stronger for women than for men. Female emotional well-being seems to be tightly bound to sexual stability — which may help explain why overall female happiness has actually drifted downward since the sexual revolution.

Among the young people Regnerus and Uecker studied, the happiest women were those with a current sexual partner and only one or two partners in their lifetime. Virgins were almost as happy, though not quite, and then a young woman’s likelihood of depression rose steadily as her number of partners climbed and the present stability of her sex life diminished.

When social conservatives talk about restoring the link between sex, monogamy and marriage, they often have these kinds of realities in mind. The point isn’t that we should aspire to some Arcadia of perfect chastity. Rather, it’s that a high sexual ideal can shape how quickly and casually people pair off, even when they aren’t living up to its exacting demands. The ultimate goal is a sexual culture that makes it easier for young people to achieve romantic happiness — by encouraging them to wait a little longer, choose more carefully and judge their sex lives against a strong moral standard.

This is what’s at stake, for instance, in debates over abstinence-based sex education. Successful abstinence-based programs (yes, they do exist) don’t necessarily make their teenage participants more likely to save themselves for marriage. But they make them more likely to save themselves for somebody, which in turn increases the odds that their adult sexual lives will be a source of joy rather than sorrow.

It’s also what’s at stake in the ongoing battle over whether the federal government should be subsidizing Planned Parenthood. Obviously, social conservatives don’t like seeing their tax dollars flow to an organization that performs roughly 300,000 abortions every year. But they also see Planned Parenthood’s larger worldview — in which teen sexual activity is taken for granted, and the most important judgment to be made about a sexual encounter is whether it’s clinically “safe” — as the enemy of the kind of sexual idealism they’re trying to restore.

Liberals argue, not unreasonably, that Planned Parenthood’s approach is tailored to the gritty realities of teenage sexuality. But realism can blur into cynicism, and a jaded attitude can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Social conservatives look at the contemporary sexual landscape and remember that it wasn’t always thus, and they look at current trends and hope that it doesn’t have to be this way forever.

In this sense, despite their instinctive gloominess, they’re actually the optimists in the debate.

January 13, 2011

Lost in Translation, in the Kitchen

Inside the kitchen of L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon, all the orders are called out in French: “canard” is duck; “homard” is lobster.

That’s not surprising — it is a French restaurant, after all. But it isn’t in Paris; it’s in Hong Kong, where most of the staff speak Cantonese and English. In fact, 90% of the employees in the kitchen are Hong Kong Chinese, says L’Atelier chef and native-French speaker Michel del Burgo. Another 5% are Japanese, the remaining 5% are French.

In the L’Atelier kitchen, says Sherman Chan, a chef who worked there for a year in 2008: “You say ‘Oui, chef,’ whether or not you understand [the request], and then turn around to ask for a translation. That’s the way it works.” Ms. Chan is a Hong Kong-native who’s mother tongue is Cantonese. She now works in Caprice, another Hong Kong restaurant. “It’s not very efficient, but eventually you learn to make your way around.”

Language is a new problem in Asian kitchens. In the past, when they were staffed mostly by locals, it wasn’t an issue. But a more integrated and international food world — a growing number of Western celebrity chefs in the region and Chinese restaurants expanding overseas — has changed that. Kitchens now are often staffed by an eclectic mix of nationalities.

Every kitchen in the Fook Lam Moon Group, the Cantonese-cuisine restaurant with seven overseas locations — four in Japan and three in China — is headed by a native-Hong Kong, Cantonese-speaking chef. In Japan, roughly 60% of the staff are Cantonese-speakers from Hong Kong, says Fook Lam Moon managing director Michelle Chui, with the remainder split evenly between Japanese and mainland Chinese, who speak Mandarin. So the kitchens in Japan are trilingual — Cantonese, Mandarin and Japanese. In its Hong Kong restaurants, however, all full-time employees speak Mandarin and Cantonese.

“There are no language prerequisites to being hired,” says Ms. Chui. “However, language and cultural differences can be a problem, since we do have instances where there’s misunderstanding amongst staff. Especially in a kitchen, which can have a rather heated atmosphere.”

Of course, some cooking terms transcend language: Classic French sauces, for instance, shouldn’t require a translation.

But other words are lost in translation. Take “umami,” now commonly known as the “fifth taste,” beyond, sweet, sour, bitter and salty. Working chefs today know what umami is — but ask them to define it in their native language, and they may stumble to find the words.

“In a certain sense, food defies languages — the language of food is taste,” says David Thompson, the executive chef of Thai restaurant Nahm in Bangkok, where Thai is spoken frequently in the kitchen. “But how else will you look deeper into a cuisine and understand how to use ingredients unless you are talking to Thais? And when you talk to Thais, you have to speak in Thai.”

Since moving to Thailand in the 1980s, Mr. Thompson has taught himself to read and write in the language. Today, the chef is fluent — “But I write like a 4-year-old,” he says.

As the Web Turns

Hey, fellas, want to spice things up with your lady? Procter & Gamble, the consumer products giant, has some ideas.

A Web site created by the company for husbands and fathers offers articles with titles like “Conquering Sex Problems.” Among other things, the article advises men to take their time in bed.

“If you want a hot woman who acts like a porn star in bed, you need to be prepared to spend some time getting her to that place,” suggests the site, ManoftheHouse.com.

While the Internet is crowded with all kinds of sex advice, P.& G. — the maker of Pampers and Ivory soap and the nation’s largest advertiser — says it has found an untapped marketing opportunity for its products in the family man.

Much of the popular sex advice for men, in publications like Maxim and GQ, is directed toward singles on the prowl, the company says. Even its top rival, Unilever, has gone decidedly raunchier in a campaign for Axe, a grooming brand aimed at young men, that includes a double entendre about cleaning sporting equipment and a man’s private parts.

The P.& G. site gets out of the bedroom, offering tips on grilling burgers, cleaning toilets and disciplining children. It promises, “We’ll make men out of you yet,” while also promoting Gillette razors, Head & Shoulders shampoo and other company products.

“What we are trying to do is speak to the whole man,” said Jeannie Tharrington, a spokeswoman for Procter & Gamble Productions. “Certainly, relationships and sex are part of an adult man’s life.”

Josh Bernoff, senior vice president at Forrester Research who has written about P.& G.’s marketing efforts, said ManoftheHouse.com was not so different from “As the World Turns,” the TV soap opera that was another P.& G. innovation.

“This is the 21st-century version of the soap opera,” he said. “It’s information. It’s topical.”

More and more big companies have discovered the how-to genre as a marketing tool. General Mills offers dieting advice and coupons on Tablespoon.com, and Wal-Mart has a Web site in which mothers blog about everything from being frugal to reviewing products.

Jeremiah Owyang, a partner at the Altimeter Group, a digital strategy consulting firm, said company-generated lifestyle sites could be effective as long as they did not push the brands too hard. Reviewing the homepage of ManoftheHouse.com, he said, “All of these discussions on this page are already happening on Facebook,” he said. “The reason these things do work is that consumers are already having these discussions, having a healthy breakfast, talking about their wives in relationships.”

Ms. Tharrington said company research found that men were going to women’s Web sites to find information on recipes, cleaning the house or getting a stain out of a shirt. As for sex talk coming from a company that has honed a wholesome image — remember Mr. Whipple? — she said, “For us, it’s part of it, but it’s not the whole thing. What we try to do is be tasteful.”

Procter & Gamble has a long history of unusual marketing. The Cincinnati-based company created one of the first radio soap operas as a way to market its products, and years later it created its own soap operas, including “As the World Turns,” for television.

In the last decade, Procter & Gamble was one of the pioneers in word-of-mouth marketing campaigns in which mothers and teenagers were plied with samples and coupons to draw more customers.

In 2000, the company introduced Beinggirl.com, which provides information and expert advice on issues that teenage girls might be too embarrassed to ask a parent or a doctor about, like menstruation, eating disorders, acne and dating. The site also advertises P.& G. tampons and offers free samples.

In the years since Beinggirl.com was created, Procter & Gamble has started several other lifestyle Web sites, including one that is directed at women, Homemadesimple.com. David Germano, the general manager of ManoftheHouse.com, said consumer data showed that 10 percent of the visitors to the women’s site were men.

ManoftheHouse.com has brought on several writers who had established father-focused blogs. Karl Withakay, a Utah-based singer and songwriter who writes some of the sex articles, including “Conquering Sex Problems,” was already writing about relationships for other media outlets.

“The pieces he wrote were based upon his own experience,” said Craig J. Heimbuch, ManoftheHouse.com’s editor in chief, in an e-mail. “I appreciate his perspective a great deal. It lends itself well to the tone of the site, which is men helping men.”

So are men drawn to a PG-rated Web site when so much R- and X-rated competition is out there? Procter & Gamble says that so far it is pleased with the number of visitors. The site was started in June, and by December it had topped a half a million monthly unique visitors.

By comparison, AskMen.com, a site with similar, if more titillating content, had 5.5 million unique visitors in December, according to comScore, the market research firm.

Jonah Disend, chief executive of the brand strategy firm Redscout, questioned whether ManoftheHouse.com would generate a big following. He said men tended to be more interested in specialized publications about a specific hobby or sport.

“Just because no one’s doing it doesn’t mean there’s a real market for it,” he said.

Racy also works. Indeed, that is just what Procter & Gamble’s archrival, Unilever, discovered in its efforts to market Axe. The campaign it started last year, which included the double entendre, has become a sensation; last month, Zeta Interactive proclaimed the ads as having received the most social media buzz in 2010.

“We’ve taken a calculated risk,” said Heather Mitchell, a Unilever spokeswoman, “knowing what resonates with our guys.”

Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior

Can a regimen of no playdates, no TV, no computer games and hours of music practice create happy kids? And what happens when they fight back?

A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:

• attend a sleepover

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• watch TV or play computer games

• choose their own extracurricular activities

• get any grade less than an A

• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin.

Erin Patrice O'Brien for The Wall Street Journal

Amy Chua with her daughters, Louisa and Sophia, at their home in New Haven, Conn.

I'm using the term "Chinese mother" loosely. I know some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish and Ghanaian parents who qualify too. Conversely, I know some mothers of Chinese heritage, almost always born in the West, who are not Chinese mothers, by choice or otherwise. I'm also using the term "Western parents" loosely. Western parents come in all varieties.

When it comes to parenting, the Chinese seem to produce children who display academic excellence, musical mastery and professional success - or so the stereotype goes. WSJ's Christina Tsuei speaks to two moms raised by Chinese immigrants who share what it was like growing up and how they hope to raise their children.

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All the same, even when Western parents think they're being strict, they usually don't come close to being Chinese mothers. For example, my Western friends who consider themselves strict make their children practice their instruments 30 minutes every day. An hour at most. For a Chinese mother, the first hour is the easy part. It's hours two and three that get tough.

Despite our squeamishness about cultural stereotypes, there are tons of studies out there showing marked and quantifiable differences between Chinese and Westerners when it comes to parenting. In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70% of the Western mothers said either that "stressing academic success is not good for children" or that "parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun." By contrast, roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way. Instead, the vast majority of the Chinese mothers said that they believe their children can be "the best" students, that "academic achievement reflects successful parenting," and that if children did not excel at school then there was "a problem" and parents "were not doing their job." Other studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately 10 times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children. By contrast, Western kids are more likely to participate in sports teams.

From Ms. Chua's album: 'Mean me with Lulu in hotel room... with score taped to TV!'

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up. But if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something—whether it's math, piano, pitching or ballet—he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. This in turn makes it easier for the parent to get the child to work even more.

Chinese parents can get away with things that Western parents can't. Once when I was young—maybe more than once—when I was extremely disrespectful to my mother, my father angrily called me "garbage" in our native Hokkien dialect. It worked really well. I felt terrible and deeply ashamed of what I had done. But it didn't damage my self-esteem or anything like that. I knew exactly how highly he thought of me. I didn't actually think I was worthless or feel like a piece of garbage.

As an adult, I once did the same thing to Sophia, calling her garbage in English when she acted extremely disrespectfully toward me. When I mentioned that I had done this at a dinner party, I was immediately ostracized. One guest named Marcy got so upset she broke down in tears and had to leave early. My friend Susan, the host, tried to rehabilitate me with the remaining guests.

The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable—even legally actionable—to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey fatty—lose some weight." By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of "health" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image. (I also once heard a Western father toast his adult daughter by calling her "beautiful and incredibly competent." She later told me that made her feel like garbage.)

Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight As. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best. Chinese parents can say, "You're lazy. All your classmates are getting ahead of you." By contrast, Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they're not disappointed about how their kids turned out.

I've thought long and hard about how Chinese parents can get away with what they do. I think there are three big differences between the Chinese and Western parental mind-sets.

Newborn Amy Chua in her mother's arms, a year after her parents arrived in the U.S.

First, I've noticed that Western parents are extremely anxious about their children's self-esteem. They worry about how their children will feel if they fail at something, and they constantly try to reassure their children about how good they are notwithstanding a mediocre performance on a test or at a recital. In other words, Western parents are concerned about their children's psyches. Chinese parents aren't. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently.

For example, if a child comes home with an A-minus on a test, a Western parent will most likely praise the child. The Chinese mother will gasp in horror and ask what went wrong. If the child comes home with a B on the test, some Western parents will still praise the child. Other Western parents will sit their child down and express disapproval, but they will be careful not to make their child feel inadequate or insecure, and they will not call their child "stupid," "worthless" or "a disgrace." Privately, the Western parents may worry that their child does not test well or have aptitude in the subject or that there is something wrong with the curriculum and possibly the whole school. If the child's grades do not improve, they may eventually schedule a meeting with the school principal to challenge the way the subject is being taught or to call into question the teacher's credentials.

If a Chinese child gets a B—which would never happen—there would first be a screaming, hair-tearing explosion. The devastated Chinese mother would then get dozens, maybe hundreds of practice tests and work through them with her child for as long as it takes to get the grade up to an A.

Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child doesn't get them, the Chinese parent assumes it's because the child didn't work hard enough. That's why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child. The Chinese parent believes that their child will be strong enough to take the shaming and to improve from it. (And when Chinese kids do excel, there is plenty of ego-inflating parental praise lavished in the privacy of the home.)

Sophia playing at Carnegie Hall in 2007.

Second, Chinese parents believe that their kids owe them everything. The reason for this is a little unclear, but it's probably a combination of Confucian filial piety and the fact that the parents have sacrificed and done so much for their children. (And it's true that Chinese mothers get in the trenches, putting in long grueling hours personally tutoring, training, interrogating and spying on their kids.) Anyway, the understanding is that Chinese children must spend their lives repaying their parents by obeying them and making them proud.

By contrast, I don't think most Westerners have the same view of children being permanently indebted to their parents. My husband, Jed, actually has the opposite view. "Children don't choose their parents," he once said to me. "They don't even choose to be born. It's parents who foist life on their kids, so it's the parents' responsibility to provide for them. Kids don't owe their parents anything. Their duty will be to their own kids." This strikes me as a terrible deal for the Western parent.

Third, Chinese parents believe that they know what is best for their children and therefore override all of their children's own desires and preferences. That's why Chinese daughters can't have boyfriends in high school and why Chinese kids can't go to sleepaway camp. It's also why no Chinese kid would ever dare say to their mother, "I got a part in the school play! I'm Villager Number Six. I'll have to stay after school for rehearsal every day from 3:00 to 7:00, and I'll also need a ride on weekends." God help any Chinese kid who tried that one.

Don't get me wrong: It's not that Chinese parents don't care about their children. Just the opposite. They would give up anything for their children. It's just an entirely different parenting model.

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Here's a story in favor of coercion, Chinese-style. Lulu was about 7, still playing two instruments, and working on a piano piece called "The Little White Donkey" by the French composer Jacques Ibert. The piece is really cute—you can just imagine a little donkey ambling along a country road with its master—but it's also incredibly difficult for young players because the two hands have to keep schizophrenically different rhythms.

Lulu couldn't do it. We worked on it nonstop for a week, drilling each of her hands separately, over and over. But whenever we tried putting the hands together, one always morphed into the other, and everything fell apart. Finally, the day before her lesson, Lulu announced in exasperation that she was giving up and stomped off.

"Get back to the piano now," I ordered.

"You can't make me."

"Oh yes, I can."

Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu's dollhouse to the car and told her I'd donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn't have "The Little White Donkey" perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, "I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?" I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn't do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.

Jed took me aside. He told me to stop insulting Lulu—which I wasn't even doing, I was just motivating her—and that he didn't think threatening Lulu was helpful. Also, he said, maybe Lulu really just couldn't do the technique—perhaps she didn't have the coordination yet—had I considered that possibility?

"You just don't believe in her," I accused.

"That's ridiculous," Jed said scornfully. "Of course I do."

"Sophia could play the piece when she was this age."

"But Lulu and Sophia are different people," Jed pointed out.

"Oh no, not this," I said, rolling my eyes. "Everyone is special in their special own way," I mimicked sarcastically. "Even losers are special in their own special way. Well don't worry, you don't have to lift a finger. I'm willing to put in as long as it takes, and I'm happy to be the one hated. And you can be the one they adore because you make them pancakes and take them to Yankees games."

I rolled up my sleeves and went back to Lulu. I used every weapon and tactic I could think of. We worked right through dinner into the night, and I wouldn't let Lulu get up, not for water, not even to go to the bathroom. The house became a war zone, and I lost my voice yelling, but still there seemed to be only negative progress, and even I began to have doubts.

Then, out of the blue, Lulu did it. Her hands suddenly came together—her right and left hands each doing their own imperturbable thing—just like that.

Lulu realized it the same time I did. I held my breath. She tried it tentatively again. Then she played it more confidently and faster, and still the rhythm held. A moment later, she was beaming.

"Mommy, look—it's easy!" After that, she wanted to play the piece over and over and wouldn't leave the piano. That night, she came to sleep in my bed, and we snuggled and hugged, cracking each other up. When she performed "The Little White Donkey" at a recital a few weeks later, parents came up to me and said, "What a perfect piece for Lulu—it's so spunky and so her."

Even Jed gave me credit for that one. Western parents worry a lot about their children's self-esteem. But as a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child's self-esteem is to let them give up. On the flip side, there's nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn't.

There are all these new books out there portraying Asian mothers as scheming, callous, overdriven people indifferent to their kids' true interests. For their part, many Chinese secretly believe that they care more about their children and are willing to sacrifice much more for them than Westerners, who seem perfectly content to let their children turn out badly. I think it's a misunderstanding on both sides. All decent parents want to do what's best for their children. The Chinese just have a totally different idea of how to do that.

Western parents try to respect their children's individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions, supporting their choices, and providing positive reinforcement and a nurturing environment. By contrast, the Chinese believe that the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future, letting them see what they're capable of, and arming them with skills, work habits and inner confidence that no one can ever take away.

January 06, 2011

Can P&G make money in places where people earn $2 a day?

As Western companies duke it out for a piece of the developing-market pie, Procter & Gamble is going deeper -- courting not just the newly rich but also the very poor. The company's vaunted R&D operation is turning up surprises.

Wei Xiao Yan, a 29-year-old farmer in China, washes her hair in the doorway of her kitchen. P&G researchers spent a day with her at home.

We are a long, long way from Cincinnati. Getting here required a 15-hour flight to Beijing, followed by a nearly three-hour flight to Lanzhou, an industrial city on the Yellow River in China's midsection, and, finally, a bumpy, two-hour drive deep into treeless hills the color of dried clay. Our destination, in a pinprick of a town called Shahe, is a small cinder-block house framed by Szechuan pepper trees, its primary decoration a poster of Chairman Mao. Eight of us -- a reporter, a photographer, two local "fixers," a translator, and three executives from Procter & Gamble -- have come here so that we can watch a 29-year-old corn and potato farmer named Wei Xiao Yan wash her hair.

And she washes it with gusto, especially considering that she is doing it in front of a crowd while standing in the doorway of her kitchen, using a small metal basin with no more than three cups of water. Water scarcity is the rule here; the family stores rainwater in a well and must pay a private company for anything more. After trying to work up some lather with a tiny bit of Rejoice -- P&G's cheapest local offering, which costs about 10 renminbi ($1.50) a bottle -- Wei Xiao Yan does a cursory rinse, then forces the family comb through her tangles. "The shampoo puts nutrients in my hair," she says, noting that it is her first bottle of real shampoo after a lifetime of using laundry soap flakes, which made her hair oily. I make the error of asking her if it might not be more practical to cut her nearly waist-length hair. She looks at me with disdain. "As a woman, you should have long hair," she snaps. "And my husband likes it."

Cindy Graulty, principal R&D scientist for P&G, and Melisa Liu, principal R&D researcher, give each other knowing looks. My blunder led to the kind of insight that P&G is seeking as it tries to learn how best to make products for the underserved -- what the company calls the "$2 a day" consumer, based on average income. Wei Xiao Yan's tart response explodes the assumption by some marketers that what poor consumers look for is the most practical, cheapest solution. Wei may live on 900 renminbi a year ($135) and have so little water that her washing machine -- a wedding gift -- is rusting in the courtyard. But that does not mean she won't make the effort to look pretty for her husband. "It's a myth to say poor people only want function," says Graulty, who has headed P&G's $2-a-day initiative since October 2009. "They care about beauty. Just like us."

Obvious, right? Yet despite the growing belief that the billions of poor -- what the late management thinker C.K. Prahalad termed the "bottom of the pyramid" -- can actually make up a viable economic market, most attempts to harness it have failed. Procter & Gamble (PG), a $79 billion (in sales) company better known for its middle- and upper-middle-class brands than for its low-end offerings, thinks there's another way to reach those consumers. So it has quietly launched a skunkworks, populated mostly by technical folks rather than market researchers, to approach the $2-a-day consumer from a new perspective. Rather than try to invent products first or rely on market research alone, the group spends days or weeks in the field, visiting homes in Brazil, China, India, and elsewhere. It's the same approach the company uses in developed markets but requires much more effort, without the obvious potential payoff from consumers with disposable income. "Our innovation strategy is not just diluting the top-tier product for the lower-end consumer," says Robert McDonald, P&G's CEO and chairman. "You have to discretely innovate for every one of those consumers on that economic curve, and if you don't do that, you'll fail."

P&G researcher Melisa Liu (left) is shown around a farm near Lanzhou by Gu Wen Juan. Liu is part of the company's "$2 a day" project, which focuses on consumers with that amount of income.

Some wonder why P&G bothers. The holy grail for companies in developing markets has always been the emerging middle class, and P&G is no exception. "Knowing how [Wei] shampoos is great," says Bill Schmitz, a managing director at Deutsche Bank Securities who covers P&G. "But she probably won't be a profitable consumer for a decade." Indeed, the company, present in 180 countries, remains committed to "mass prestige" -- delivering high-quality brands such as Olay, Crest, Tide, and Pampers to the middle and upper classes at a premium price. Even as P&G has focused more on developing markets, with sales there rising to 34% from 20% in 2000, its target customer is still the Shanghai bank manager we also visited. She lives in a new high-rise, dines out, and favors P&G's SK-II skin-care products, which retail for up to $374.

It is this woman, not Wei, who is the focus of the old saying "If every one of the 2.5 billion Chinese and Indians just bought one [Coke or package of Pampers or bar of Dove soap or insert product here] a [day, week, month], we would [double, triple, quadruple] our sales." Yet P&G, realizing that its future success lies in the developing world, has concluded that it must compete at the lower end of the spectrum as aggressively as it does at the higher one. For too long, says P&G director Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, the company ceded ground. "There was debate at the board level," he says. "It pushed them to stop being only premium and not to give competitors a safe harbor."

For P&G the stakes are high, in part because of some harsh new realities. Start with the fact that the global recession put a dent in P&G's up-the-curve strategy. Then there is the simple paradox of growth: For a giant company to grow at the levels it has in the past -- and satisfy its investors, as its stock is about where it was five years ago -- P&G must expand aggressively, even if it means moving away from its core strength. P&G says developing markets are growing at 6% to 8% annually, compared with 1% to 2% in the developed world. The market for the poor remains largely untapped.

"We're late to those markets," says McDonald, who spent much of his career overseas, including in Japan and the Philippines. "As a result, we've got to do things smarter." He's not exaggerating. In Brazil, which many think is poised to exhibit China-type growth, Colgate-Palmolive (CL) has a 71% market share in toothpaste; P&G wasn't even in the category until 18 months ago. Unilever (UL), with its Anglo-Dutch colonial heritage, already gets more than 50% of its sales from developing markets. "P&G is still very U.S.-centric," says Paul Polman, Unilever's CEO (and until 2006 a P&G exec). "What Bob is doing is not wrong, but it will take some time. Emerging markets are in the DNA of our company."

Throwing down the gauntlet, McDonald has set a hugely ambitious goal of 800 million new customers by 2015 and says he is shifting the company's emphasis from the West to Asia and Africa. Even in China, a notable success story for P&G since it entered a joint venture with Hutchison Whampoa in 1988, per capita spending on P&G products is just $3 a year, vs. nearly $100 in the U.S.? McDonald wants to raise the average expenditure globally from $11.50 in the next few years. "The move of the center of gravity is critical," he says.

To communicate that approach, he has changed the strategy of the company to "Touching and improving more lives, in more parts of the world, more completely." What he calls "purpose-inspired growth" is meant to help his employees believe that they are not merely pushers of deodorant and dryer sheets, but instead helping improve people's daily existence. "It's more than a noble idea," McDonald proclaimed at the company's Dec. 16 analyst meeting. "It's a game-changing growth strategy and a powerful source of competitive advantage." Certainly when aimed at the $2-a-day customer, the idea of improving lives allows people like Graulty to feel that her project has meaning. "It's almost like you don't even have to pay us to do this," she says. "Don't tell our managers that."

Going local on R&D

Beautiful Chinese women wearing red cheongsams are striking drums that seem to be made of water. A dragon with smoldering eyes undulates on the stage as P&G CEO McDonald and CTO Bruce Brown nod to various local dignitaries, including China's vice minister of commerce. You've seen this movie before; it's yet another ribbon cutting for a Western company expanding in China -- this time for P&G's Beijing Innovation Center (BJIC), a sparkling $70 million home for the company's regional R&D efforts. Already the company has invested more than $1 billion in China, and McDonald says it will spend another $1 billion in the next five years.

Yet leaving all the hoopla aside, the center is particularly important when it comes to P&G's shifting priorities. Though the company has 25 R&D centers all over the world, BJIC is an attempt to research, source, and develop products for China and the rest of Asia without having to rely on the company's headquarters in Cincinnati.

One of the most important reasons for that is the masses of high-caliber talent coming out of Chinese universities. The hope is that all that brainpower will lead to innovations that will also work in the developed world. P&G is, amazingly, one of the top three choices among Chinese university graduates looking for jobs. And the place is pulsing with the energy of young people who want to make it big; as a raucous karaoke party shows, they seem to have both right- and left-brain abilities. The campus feels a bit like being at a Silicon Valley startup -- except that it's a unit of a 173-year-old company.

For most of its history P&G, which puts a whopping $2 billion annually into R&D, succeeded by inventing technically superior products at home, then pushing them out to the market in a command-and-control fashion. Only over the past decade, as former CEO A.G. Lafley pried open the company to ideas from the outside, did things change. The Swiffer and the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser -- both hits for P&G -- came about through partnerships with outside product developers.

James Kaw, Director of P&G BJIC; Maurizio Marchesini, Manager of P&G Asia R&D; Bruce Brown,P&G's CTO; and CEO McDonald (from left) at the opening of the company's Beijing Innovation Center in August

BJIC is the only tech center in the developing world that operates across all the company's global business units, or GBUs, as P&Gers, acronym lovers all, tag it. Similar to the company's baby playrooms and fake supermarkets in Ohio, here a simulated hutong (a typical Chinese home) lets researchers observe consumers as they brush their teeth or change a diaper, then make immediate changes to prototypes. "Now we can do end-to-end product innovation," says Brown.

Even before the new center opened last August, several new products came out of China. They included Tide Naturals, a skin-sensitive detergent for women who wash clothing by hand, and Crest Pro Health toothpaste, a premium brand whose main researcher, Wang Xiaoli, cracked a 50-year chemistry problem by finding a way for stannous fluoride -- a stronger form of fluoride -- to stabilize in water. Wang, who won a companywide innovation award, says she came to P&G because "I didn't want what I learned to be published in 100 years."

The key, says McDonald, is making sure that technical development and testing are done locally. That's something P&G's Gillette unit learned the hard way before P&G bought it in 2005, when it developed a razor specifically for Indian men. Since many of them shave only a couple of times a week, often using a basin, they have longer facial hair than most Western men. Rather than testing in India, Boston-based Gillette decided to try out the razor on Indian men who were studying at MIT. They loved it, so the company went ahead with a launch in India. It flopped -- because the MIT students, unlike much of the Indian market, had access to running water. Lesson learned, P&G retrenched, tested locally, and last October launched Gillette Guard, a razor that is easier to rinse.

New uses for old ideas

The most valuable consumer insights for P&G's $2-a-day explorers are transnational ones. That's why Liu, a young Chinese woman who has worked in the research division of P&G for six years, has spent much of the past one trekking through the jungles of Brazil, the slums of India, and farming villages in rural China. She is bringing what she learns back to Beijing -- and hoping that the knowledge will lead to wins elsewhere. Back at Wei's home, she pulls out a plastic bag full of products -- some new prototypes, some off the shelf -- for her to sample. Wei relies on a washcloth and a scrap of soap to clean her body, and she never undresses completely -- not because of water concerns, but because of privacy issues. There is no bathroom, her father-in-law lives in the home, and she feels she has no place to go.

Out of the bag comes an unmarked bottle with a body cleanser formulated to clean without much water. It's kind of like Purell -- except that it generates foam, which can be easily wiped away, instead of lather. The technology comes from an existing hair-color product, which means that it's a potential win-win for P&G, a new use for an old idea. "We just have so much stuff," says Graulty. "Our job is finding the right match." Liu pulls out a bottle of Febreze -- an air freshener for relatively affluent customers -- and shows Wei its use as a spray to improve the smell of clothing that can't be washed often.

She likes it, but not as much as the leave-in conditioner they try next; the look on her face when she touches her hair is one of deep desire. I can't help but wonder whether this experience is touching and improving her life, or tantalizing her by introducing her to something she can't have. The item Wei likes most, though, is one that P&G doesn't even make: an off-the-shelf camping shower, basically a large plastic bag that hangs on a line or a tree and lets you shower with sun-heated water. For her it is a breakthrough product -- she can wash in private.

Does that mean, I ask, that P&G should go into the camping-shower business? No, says Graulty; certainly the company might try partnering with a producer to sell, say, cleanser with one, but the real insight is privacy. Graulty's project has uncovered other misconceptions about poor consumers, including the notion that they always want the simplest product (they don't), and that they are not as aspirational as the more well-to-do (they are). They need more skin-care products because they spend so much more time outside. And though P&G never contemplated selling hair dye to poor customers, Graulty has learned that in those parts of the world, dye is very much in demand. "It's a paradigm shift," she says. "We say, 'Why would they buy that? It's not like food, clothing, and shelter.' But to get a good job, to be presentable, they have to have beauty." The R&D folks are now working on a colorant that uses little water -- and is priced appropriately for a $2-a-day customer.

To be sure, it will be a while before any of this research helps P&G make real headway. In the meantime, the company is relying on classic tactics like price cuts and advertising to gain share. "Promotions win quarters," McDonald told the analysts. "Innovation takes decades." His message may be working. After a few years of skepticism, P&G is gaining fans like Goldman Sachs's Andrew Sawyer, who upgraded the stock in December largely on the company's emerging-market strategy.

Though no product has been launched yet from the $2-a-day project, Brown says several are in the works, including a hair-care product beginning formal testing in India. Last fall the group of about 100 met for the first-ever $2-a-day confab. (Ironically, the meeting took place not in Africa or Asia, but in Cincinnati -- "The logistics were better," Brown says, apologetically.) One move McDonald has not made so far is to form a formal business unit. That's the type of thing the company might have done immediately in the past -- but management now believes would be better handled locally, across silos. "If there were a $2-a-day division," director Cook says, "everyone else would wash their hands of it."

Now, if everyone else would simply begin to wash his hands with P&G products, the company might get somewhere.